Choose to be changed. Oh be infused with the rapture of a fireThat shows not what's changing in it as it burns,For the directive spirit of the earth entire,Loves the figure of flight not so much as the point where it turns.Who cleaves to bare survival is already arrested, and how safe really is that unremarkable gray?Faraway a supreme endurance warns against hardening, as if an invisible hammer were suspended in air.

Whoever pours out like a stream is beckoned to knowand at last is led through the play of harmoniesthat end at the start and begin in the ending.

Every fortunate moment where two can cross paths,and be astonished, is the offspring of our departure. And sothe fleet-formed Daphne, transformed into laurel,wants you to turn into wind.

Music evolves as composers, performers, and consumers favor some musical variants over others. To investigate the role of consumer selection, we constructed a Darwinian music engine consisting of a population of short audio loops that sexually reproduce and mutate. This population evolved for 2,513 generations under the selective influence of 6,931 consumers who rated the loops’ aesthetic qualities. We found that the loops quickly evolved into music attributable, in part, to the evolution of aesthetically pleasing chords and rhythms. Later, however, evolution slowed. Applying the Price equation, a general description of evolutionary processes, we found that this stasis was mostly attributable to a decrease in the fidelity of transmission. Our experiment shows how cultural dynamics can be explained in terms of competing evolutionary forces.

"Music expresses, in some way, the movement of the feelings (or emotional values) that cling to the unconscious processes … music represents the movement, development, and transformation of the motifs of the collective unconscious."― Carl Jung

what makes a good expression? to express something musically in the utmost potential? it is tucked away in the temporal monotony of intentional repetition otherwise known as practice. a cop out in context, i know! deconstructed, however, intention is absolutely never without a purpose, which is to say that to express is to impose in every way however possible a subjective reality in objective time.

what is subjective reality in objective time? try to write down internal dialogue while watching a stopwatch.

How do our brains know what to do with music? Is the ability to distinguish music part of human DNA? Best selling author, neuroscientist and musician Daniel J. Levitin returns to our studio with Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker to talk about the biology of music.

Music, an abstract stimulus, can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving, similar to tangible rewards that involve the striatal dopaminergic system. Using the neurochemical specificity of [11C]raclopride positron emission tomography scanning, combined with psychophysiological measures of autonomic nervous system activity, we found endogenous dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional arousal during music listening. To examine the time course of dopamine release, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging with the same stimuli and listeners, and found a functional dissociation: the caudate was more involved during the anticipation and the nucleus accumbens was more involved during the experience of peak emotional responses to music. These results indicate that intense pleasure in response to music can lead to dopamine release in the striatal system. Notably, the anticipation of an abstract reward can result in dopamine release in an anatomical pathway distinct from that associated with the peak pleasure itself. Our results help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies.